[dustbunny]

I also strongly disliked luas syntax at first but now I feel like the meta tables and what not and pcall and all that stuff is kinda worth it. I like everything about Lua except some of the awkward syntax but I find it so much better then JS, but I haven't been a web dev in over a decade

[junon]

The only thing I dislike about Lua is the 1-indexing. I know they had reasons for it but it always caused issues.

[silisili]

I'm torn on this.

Initially I agreed, just because so many other languages do it that way.

But if you ignore that and clean slate it, IMO, 1 based makes more sense. I feel like 0 based mainly gained foothold because of C's bastardization of arrays vs pointers and associated tricks. But most other languages don't even support that.

You can only see :len(x)-1 so many times before you realize how ridiculous it is.

[wzdd]

Python got this right. Zero-based indexing combined with half-open slice notation means as a practical matter you don't see too many -1s in the code. Certainly far fewer than when I wrote a game in Löve for a gamejam, where screen co-ordinates are naturally zero-indexed, which has implications for everything onscreen (tile indices, sprites, ...)

[junon]

0 based has a LOT of benefits whereas the reasoning, if I recall, for 1-indexing in Lua was to make the language more approachable to non-devs.

Having written a game in it (via LÖVE), the 1-indexing was a continued source of problems. On the other hand, I rarely need to use len-1, especially since most languages expose more readable methods such as `last()`.

[bvrmn]

I could live with 1-indexing but a closed range array unpack (slices) is quite big toll and breaks nice intuitive invariant.

[vrighter]

I don't mind the 1-based indexing at all. It's pretty easy to mentally switch into/out of the correct mindset after only a short while.

What does bug me is that Lua, the language, is 1-based, but its C api is not.